Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
When Cray Computing, a supercomputer manufacturer acquired by HP in 2019, announced that it would build El Capitan it expected the computer to reach a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops. Today, the 64th edition of the TOP500 — a long-running ranking of the world's non-distributed supercomputers — was published, and El Capitan not only exceeded that forecast by clocking 1.742 exaflops, but has claimed the title as the most powerful supercomputer in the world right now.
El Capitan is only the third “exascale” computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. Cray had a hand in all three systems.
El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt.
If you’re wondering what El Capitan is built for, the answer is addressing nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism. Being more powerful than anticipated, it’s likely to occupy the throne for a long while before another exascale computer overtakes it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Friday November 22, @09:14PM (4 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @09:45PM
"What's with the shitty moderations [soylentnews.org] today?"
The Right/Libertarians are showing their fangs/true nature after Their Hero won.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Friday November 22, @10:45PM
I have it a +1 Insightful because I thought the same.
I guess (haven’t yet read others replies) that it is used to model nuclear fallout across the continental US. I’ve seen an article in the last year in Scientific American about this, showing the danger levels for people in case of an explosion at the main nuke sites.
But part of me thinks it should be used for better purposes. Like modelling climate change or finding a cure for cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @10:59AM (1 child)
Calm down cowboy, these things rectify themselves after a few minutes.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday November 23, @11:28AM
One person moderated it down, and 4 people have moderated it up. Currently at +5.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.